Ralph Koltai’s contrasting of panels of corroded metal with smooth objects makes for some attractive combinations, reminding me of similar rough and smooth juxtapositions by artist and designer Russell Mills, notably on one of his Samuel Beckett covers and his design for Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Pearl. Koltai’s site also includes a gallery of his designs for theatre. Digital rust infiltrates my own work now and then via some photos I took of a Manchester railway bridge, the most recent use being in the background of the cover for Finch.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch posters
• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills
• The art of Jo Whaley

Stalker (1979).

Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the director of a Russian sf novel, Roadside Picnic, by Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky. Tarkovsky’s production suffered from technical calamities, illness, artistic disagreements and, worst of all, location work in a polluted area which (allegedly) caused the early deaths of a number of the people involved, including the director and leading actor, Anatoli Solonitsyn. All of which makes the completed film seem both miraculous and chilling for reasons beyond its uniquely sinister atmosphere.

When the British Film Institute launched a survey on “the film you would like to share with future generations”, behind Blade Runner in first place was a surprise second place entry: Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction film Stalker, in which a guide leads two clients to a site known as “the Zone”, which has the supposed potential to fulfill a person’s innermost desires. This creative documentary tells the remarkable story behind the making of Stalker, including the series of conflicts which led to crew members, most notably celebrated director of photography Georgi Rerberg, being left off the credits, leaving careers in tatters. Far from your standard making of doc, Director Igor Mayboroda has woven an engrossing “documentary cinema novel” which not only stands as a tribute to Rerberg’s career but also as a delight for cinephiles interested in how the creative process can flourish even under the most difficult and ultimately devastating of circumstances.

Stalker as it currently exists on DVD has a couple of interviews about the making of the film but nothing as substantial as Mayboroda’s documentary which sounds like essential viewing. Those in the Sheffield area can see a repeat showing on November 8.

Also at the Doc/Fest is a new film for the BBC’s long-running arts series, Arena, which will no doubt be screened on TV in due course. Eno is directed by Nicola Roberts and—needless to say—its subject is musician, producer, artist, etc, Brian Eno. Arena has always used Eno’s short piece, Another Green World, for its theme music but I believe this is the first time he’s been profiled in the series. Roberts also directed the excellent 1994 Arena doc, Philip K Dick: A Day in the Afterlife, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing this one as well.

• Danger! High-radiation arthouse! | Geoff Dyer on his own Stalker obsession.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brian Eno: Imaginary Landscapes
• The slow death of modernism
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• The Stalker meme

Two experimental films by British filmmakers. Berlin Horse (1970) at Ubuweb is a hypnotic piece of minimalism by Malcolm Le Grice who subjects found footage of exercising horses to a series of loopings and filterings that push the degraded images to a point of textured abstraction. Of note with this film is the equally minimal and repetitive score, a piano loop created by Brian Eno. This was before he gained prominence as a member of Roxy Music but the slight piece of experimentation points the way to his post-Roxy career and his ambient investigations. Berlin Horse is available on DVD from Lux, with a selection of Le Grice’s other shorts.

Marvo Movie (1967) at Europa Film Treasures is a typically frenetic work by Jeff Keen, four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout. Despite the year of its creation, the effect is less psychedelic and more like an amphetamine rush.

• Malcolm Le Grice at YouTube
• Jeff Keen at YouTube

Moldover’s CD case: a working theremin.

In May this year, Brian Eno was writing in Prospect magazine about the current state of the music business as it continues to be assailed by digital technology. Among the things Eno discussed was the packaging of music:

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. … That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up. (More.)

Having started out as an album cover artist (I wasn’t a designer back then), and working still as a CD designer, this is naturally an attractive thesis. Earlier this week John Walsh in The Independent wrote a potted history of the album cover and noted that the big record companies are also realising again that contemporary music as an artform is more than merely a collection of audio tracks:

Apple, creator of the iPod and the iTunes store—the sworn enemies of commercially-packaged music—is getting into bed with the four largest record labels, to help them stimulate album sales. They’re working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on something called “Project Cocktail” that will produce all manner of extras to go with albums: interactive booklets, sleeve notes, photographs, lyric sheets, even video clips. Buyers will be able to call up album tracks through the interactive booklet, while leafing through pictures of the band and trying to make sense of the lyrics.

This, however, seems to be missing the point. Absolutely anything digital can be copied and passed on, and that applies equally to album extras as to the tracks themselves. What can’t be copied, of course, is a desirable object which contains the music. The lavish album sleeves of the 1970s were very much desirable objects which contained music, and no end of facsimile CDs of Physical Graffiti will match the impact of Peter Corriston and Mike Doud’s design for the vinyl release.

Which brings us to Moldover’s extraordinary light-operated theremin-in-a-CD-case, a beautiful design and a really clever use of the wretched jewel case box. The music on Moldover’s accompanying CD may be swapped around illicitly but no one is going to copy the hardware. The “Awesome Edition” of this work costs $50 and can be ordered here.

Moldover’s theremin is only an adjunct to his music, albeit a delightful one. Tristan Perich, on the other hand, like Fm3’s Buddha Machine, makes the case and the instrument one, and in Perich’s case (so to speak) possibly takes the 8-bit/chiptune thing to a definitive extreme. This is the kind of invention we could use more of, not some lazy Flash applications appended to a pop release then dumped onto the iTunes Store as an “exclusive”. It’s notable that the one thing all these works have in common is that they’re the inventions of no-budget independent artists, not big record labels.

While we’re on the subject of the Buddha Machine, the guys at Mountain*7 noted this YouTube loop work which extends the drone-loop idea into the audio/visual realm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buddha Machine Wall
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

I was a Space Age boy. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 a month before I was born, and growing up in the 1960s it was impossible to be unaware of the NASA missions. The first encyclopaedia I was given in 1967 had a whole chapter about the Mercury and Gemini projects which ran from the late 1950s through to 1966. A subsequent section showed an artist’s impression of how it might look when we were exploring the Moon and the planets. By the time the photo above was taken, in 1968 or ’69, I was obsessed with the Apollo missions and had the names of the astronauts memorised the way others memorised the names of football players. (Everyone knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon; I’ve never forgotten that Michael Collins was the third member of the team, waiting for them in the command module.) For a while there was an American boy at school of whom I was deeply jealous; his father was in the USAF and his family had actually been present during the launch of Apollo 8!

Space was everywhere, it became a dominant theme, at least while the Apollo missions lasted. Pop culture of the 1950s had its share of rockets ships and flying saucers but was predominantly filled with Westerns and other Earth-bound adventures. You can see a watershed moment occurring when the hugely popular Gerry Anderson puppet shows went from the cowboy adventure of Four Feather Falls in 1960 to the science fiction of Supercar and, immediately after that, the full-on space adventure of Fireball XL5 in 1961 and ’62. Cowboys couldn’t compete with astronauts; Supercar and subsequent Anderson shows were regularly repeated; Four Feather Falls wasn’t. As well as being enthused by the Anderson shows I enjoyed something called Space Patrol, another science fiction puppet series which few now seem to remember.

A page from a 1977 catalogue for Airfix model kits. I had the lunar module and the Saturn V. I don’t recall ever being interested in the Russian craft.

I wasn’t watching TV when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon—it was 3.39 am here, I was fast asleep—but that didn’t matter, it was the event rather than the moment which counted. And there were five more landings following Apollo 11, each repeating those first moments and all accepted with the same spirit of innocent enthusiasm. What none of us kids realised at the time was that these events weren’t universally seen as a positive thing. Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson later declared that going into space was the next crucial step in human evolution but you wouldn’t know it looking through the underground press of the period. Appraisal of the NASA missions was filtered through the prisms of the Cold War and the cultural war of the 1960s, with the entire Apollo enterprise being seen as a spin-off of the US military—the astronauts were all airforce pilots, after all—encouraged by a despised President Nixon and used as a means of embarrassing the Soviet Union. (That latter point tends to forget that the Russians were playing tit-for-tat, and had earlier embarrassed the US with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.) No one wanted to support men with crewcuts who prayed in space and enjoyed country & western music. And few were prepared to concede that a President stoking the Vietnam War might have inadvertently done something worthwhile by continuing Kennedy’s space programme.

The cover of International Times for July 18, 1969, the Moon mission seen as an exploding Coke bottle which shatters the sky. An editorial within complains about the hoisting of an American flag on the Earth’s satellite.

There was a similar hostility in the attitudes of some of the younger breed of sf writers of the time who saw the Moon missions being praised and supported by the old guard of sf and, like the counterculture freaks, seemed disappointed by the conservative character of the astronauts. I only know this retrospectively, of course, but the complaints have always seemed rather purposeless; those guys were test pilots, what else were people expecting? Equally dismaying was the amount of times throughout the Seventies and Eighties you’d hear black musicians only referring to the space missions in terms of a waste of money. What happened, I’d want to know, to Sun Ra’s “Space is the place”, to the elegant science fiction of Samuel R Delany, and to Parliament’s Mothership Connection? (For a more positive attitude we now have Afrofuturism.)

My own disappointment came in 1972 when it became evident that the whole show was over. As Tom Wolfe notes, after the Moon landing there was nowhere left to go. I developed a taste for written science fiction which lasted for several years but I’ve wondered sometimes whether that sense of a vaunted interplanetary future being brought to a dead stop isn’t the reason why I’ve since regarded all visions of the future as deeply suspect. Everything in the 1960s told us that by 2009 we’d have bases on the moon and probably Mars; some of us might be living in Gerard K O’Neill’s space colonies. When that future, which for a while seemed not only likely but inevitable, can be so easily short-circuited, why should we believe any others presented to us?

Related links:
• NASA’s pages for the Apollo missions
• Wired: The Moon Landings: Fact, Not Fiction
• Wired: The Science of Apollo 11
• Geeta Dayal on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno
• Pink Floyd’s Moon-Landing Jam Session
• Armstrong and Aldrin’s “lost Lunar City”
• Julius Grimm’s map of the Moon from 1888

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Apollo liftoff
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

Forty years ago I was seven years old and this sight, dear reader, was the most thrilling thing in the whole world. Even now, seeing again the classic fisheye moment of Apollo 11’s launch sparks a buried flare of childhood excitement, resurrecting a deep obsession with astronauts, Saturn V rockets, command modules and lunar landing craft. In 1969 all I could do was gape in awe at our tiny black-and-white TV screen as it showed men going to the Moon right this minute!

Now I’m the same age as the astronauts of the Apollo missions I look at these photographs and feel at different kind of awe, at the courage required to sit at the top of a metal tower as tall as St Paul’s Cathedral filled with highly-combustible rocket fuel. And that’s before you get to the liftoff itself with its punishing g-forces, followed by navigating a vacuum for several days in a tin can controlled by less computer power than you’d find now in the average mobile phone. None of this occurred to me when I was seven, all that mattered was the fact that men were going to the Moon right this minute!

I’ll return to those childhood obsessions later (no, you don’t escape that easily). Meanwhile the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission is naturally generating a fair amount of web attention. NASA has a new site, We Choose the Moon, which augments their older archives. And New Scientist tells us Why the moon still matters. On the same site there’s also Brian Eno discussing the Moon missions and his 1983 soundtrack album, Apollo, which I’m listening to right this minute!

• Apollo 11 at the Big Picture
• Weaving the way to the Moon | The beatnik and the little old ladies

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

I’m a bit late with this one but better late than never. Brian Eno’s illuminated transformation of the Sydney Opera House, part of the city’s Luminous Festival, was widely publicised last month but I never got round to checking it out properly. This week Thom drew my attention (thanks Thom!) to this panorama by photographer Peter Murphy whose marvellous view inside one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms I linked to in March. Looking on Murphy’s site I see he has another Kusama panorama showing a view inside Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show). And while we’re on the subject of Ms Kusama, she currently has a room at London’s Hayward Gallery as part of their Walking in My Mind series by different artists. You can see a reaction to that here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Callanish Standing Stone panoramas
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• Infinite reflections
• Large Hadron Collider panoramas
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

This 1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy is one of my favourite paperback cover designs. The “illustration” (as it’s described on the back) is a photograph of an artwork by artist/designer Russell Mills and the minimal credit gives no indication as to whether it was Mills who was responsible for the striking type layout. I’ve noted previously the equally striking Picador designs by the Quay Brothers who were responsible for both art and layout on their covers. Mills extended his work into graphic design later with album cover designs (and some book design) for Brian Eno, David Sylvian, David Toop and others so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in this case.

The Picador edition of Murphy was published in 1983 and comprises part of this week’s book haul. The three small Mills paintings suit the novel but I prefer his sculptural and collage works. I’ve taken to collecting more of these older Picador editions in recent years since they don’t turn up secondhand as often as they used to. As with the Quay Brothers and Italo Calvino, I wonder now how many Beckett covers Mills produced for Picador. The books list More Pricks than Kicks and Company in addition to these titles. He was still working for them up to 1986 when he and Brian Eno collaborated on the graphics for Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Unlike the world of Penguin collecting, this area lacks adequate documentation; further investigation is required.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Beckett directs Beckett
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• The art of Shinro Ohtake
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• Film by Samuel Beckett

Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama (2002).

One of my favourite contemporary artworks, Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama, receives a new showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Her mirrored room features 150 lights and a pool of water and while most photos show an impressive work, none of them can match this fantastic 360º panorama by Australian photographer Peter Murphy. Kusama isn’t the only artist to use mirrors this way but mirror rooms and reflective surfaces have become as much a recurrent feature of her work as her trademark spots.

Fireflies on the Water is being shown as part of the Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years exhibition and can be seen until June 8th, 2009. (Via Nevertheless.)

Mirrored Room by Lucas Samaras (1966).

I’ve often wondered how far back the invention of the fully-mirrored room can be traced. Halls of mirrors are historically common but the mirrors tend to be on the walls only. American artist Lucas Samaras produced his Mirrored Room (with mirrored chair and table) in 1966, something which fascinated me when I first encountered it in art books.

It evidently fascinated ex-art student Brian Eno who I’m sure must have borrowed the idea for the cover of his collaboration with Robert Fripp, (No Pussyfooting), in 1973. I’ve always assumed this was a room in Eno’s home at the time but never seen that confirmed. Anyone know whether this is the case?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• Yayoi Kusama
• The art of Yayoi Kusama
• Exposure by Robert Fripp

I created a cover design recently for Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Finch, and shortly after completing that Jeff asked if I could put together some cover ideas for his forthcoming writer’s guide, Booklife, which Tachyon will be publishing later this year. Jeff is known as a fantasy writer but this book was intended to have a general appeal for any would-be or working writer. It also needed to look suitably contemporary and (possibly) reflect the discussion within which concerns the modern writer’s use of computers, the internet and social networks. Lastly, several lines of text needed to be placed on the cover without it looking confused or messy.

I agreed to this whilst busy with several other projects so the initial drafts were rather haphazard. (That’s my excuse, anyway.) The first version (above) came out of an idea to apply a kind of trompe l’oeil effect to the cover with a torn dustjacket and handwritten amendments. The red call-out/roundel highlights an important sub-section of the book. This was knocked up very quickly and, as well as not looking very contemporary, the title doesn’t look enough like gold blocking to be convincing. Jeff requested something more up-to-date.

Version 2 was a hasty attempt to get contemporary although this looks too bland and sterile, like a business primer or a university press book. We’d talked about trying to convey the nature of electronic networks without resorting to the internet clichés of the Nineties, hence the connected books in the background. I was thinking of the kind of clear-line illustration you get in some European comics but this turned out to be one of those ideas which seem good in the abstract yet trying to get it to work turns out to be a) difficult and b) not such a good idea after all. The background quickly became crowded and confused when trying to convey any kind of depth. This cover has the first appearance of one of my sunbursts, a habitual motif I’m guilty of using in places where it doesn’t always belong. I blame a Catholic upbringing which left me with a halo obsession.

Jeff wasn’t keen on this either so he suggested I go back to the first version but show an old Victorian book design ripped away to reveal something contemporary underneath. He mentioned William Morris designs but I didn’t think they would be suitable; Morris’s books have beautiful elaborate borders but their layout follows the medieval page grid which is asymmetrical. I wanted something equally elaborate but with suitable symmetry.

A bit of web searching turned up this Jean Lorrain cover by Léon Rudnicki which I have in a book of art nouveau design but at a size too small to be usable. It took a fair amount of work to refashion a medium-res jpeg into the vector version below.

Some additional work in Photoshop and we had something which looked like an old cover blocked in gold.

Which was then ripped away to reveal a new version of the earlier bland cover. A globe has been introduced as a new feature although I warned about globes being too closely associated with travel books.

An unfinished draft. Jeff suggested changing the green cover to blue and he wasn’t keen on the diagonal tear so this was made horizontal. By this point I’d decided to get rid of the networked books and replace them with symbols that convey the digital world. Ideally you’d want to spend some time creating symbols like this yourself but I still had too many other things on the go so these are taken from a Linotype set of office dingbats. Some of these are now distinctly dated, there’s a floppy disc (which I didn’t use) and the computer monitor has a curved edge to the screen like an old TV. The sunburst is still hanging in there but has turned blue. In design terms blue often signifies the future (in a cold electronic sense) in the same way that sepia signifies the past.

Another unfinished draft which attempted to combine the symbols with the globe. Jeff liked this but I didn’t, I felt that attempting to combine two very different covers had led us astray. Jeff was still eager to convey a sense of modernity or even the future and I thought this would be difficult. In the 1990s there was a well-defined sense of futurity attached to anything cybernetic or computer-oriented. That idea and its attendant imagery is now thoroughly outmoded, computer technology is so embedded in our lives that we barely notice it. Our phones are as powerful as home computers were a decade ago. In graphic design terms there’s currently no shorthand (apart from vague blue tones) that says “the future”, not least because people aren’t sure what the future will be or if there’ll be one that anyone actually wants to live in.

So the torn book was scrapped but I kept the globe and some of the office symbols. The roundel still persists. I picked out a distinctive typeface for the title although if we’d have gone with this as the final cover I would have removed the filler elements from the O and the D.

Jeff thought this was okay but asked to see the globe brought back so here it is along with the returning sunburst.

I think this was the one which Jeff liked most of all but I didn’t although the colours at least blend together. I felt we were still at the cold business end of things and suggested scrapping all of these approaches and trying something new.

Which is what I did. Jeff had earlier suggested growing roots although I couldn’t see how that could be easily reconciled with the digital networks aspect. USB cables as roots? Hmm… Whilst pondering this one of those flashes of inspiration occurred which I immediately sketched and emailed. I knew this would look good if it was done as a very clean vector layout—a cross-section of earth with the title putting out roots and books blooming from a plant stem. Jeff liked it so I set to work.

First thing to do was to get the title right which involved printing out the type at large size then drawing the roots with a pencil.

Next I needed a suitably stylised plant and came across this very tiny motif in one of my design source books. This was from an art nouveau border design so a trace element of older book styles would still be present. All that was required now was to put the various elements together.

And here’s the result which finally pleased everyone. Slightly different to the sketch since I decided to borrow a trick from designer Barney Bubbles and make the book flowers and the title lettering form a face which gives an additional, subliminal quality to the title. I managed to get the sunburst in there with some justification at last—it adds depth and colour as well as being…the sun—and there was enough space for a quote at the top. All the type ended up as different weights of Helvetica. Watching the Brian Eno documentary last night I was struck by his comment that instruments today give you a vast array of sounds when all you really need are a handful of very good ones. The same applies to typefaces. I love typography, and enjoy seeing new designs appear, but despite the thousands of available typefaces you often come back to a small selection which do the job better than anything else. Helvetica is one of these.

This cover is a good example of how much the design process is about narrowing your range of options. Some of the blind alleys would have been avoided if we’d discussed ideas at length beforehand but we were both very busy and some of the intermediate stages only came together after playing around in Illustrator. This isn’t the first time I’ve had the flash of inspiration occur way down the line, sometimes all you can do is thrash around waiting for lightning to strike. I’m happy to say it usually strikes for me a lot earlier than this but as long as it keeps striking I don’t mind. As always, reaching the destination is the important thing, not how you get there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• A cover for Mr. VanderMeer
• Pasticheur’s Addiction
• Fungal observations
• Shriek: The Movie
• Jeff on Bldgblog
• An announcement redux
• City of Saints and Madmen

From Eonism back to Eno with Imaginary Landscapes, a 40-minute documentary from 1989, directed by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo. As usual it’s good to see BE discussing his ideas about music and art although I’d have preferred less of the atmosphere shots and more talk. The film is available to view in a streaming version here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Moonlight in Glory
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Cover painting by Tom Phillips, design by Russell Mills.

A post for a Thursday.

Brian Eno’s ambient music receives a lot of playing time here, especially Music for Airports, On Land, The Shutov Assembly and, when something really minimal is required, Neroli. But it’s Thursday Afternoon which receives the most attention. Recorded at the request of Sony Japan in 1984, Thursday Afternoon is a single piece which originally accompanied seven of Eno’s “video paintings”, each of them showing Christine Alicino warped and blurred by ultra-slow motion and video noise. Like his earlier static views of the New York skyline, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, filming vertically means that proper viewing can only be achieved by turning the TV on its side. The soundtrack is a beautifully rendered composition which uses Eno’s customary process of letting a number of looped phrases form a shifting musical moiré.

Compositionally, Thursday Afternoon belongs to the family of works which also includes Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as “holographic”, by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. (From the album notes.)

Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno and Michael Brook were all involved in the creation and production of Thursday Afternoon and the piece works as well played very quietly as it does at louder volume. When played louder more of the background detail becomes apparent, including some very faint birdsong which is most discernible at the end when much of the music has faded away. Perfect for colouring the atmosphere of a room whilst reading, working or talking with friends. It’s also a favourite of mine for playing in the bedroom with someone special.

Thursday Afternoon was released on video cassette then appeared on CD in 1985. As a single track of 61 minutes, this was one of the first original recordings which made specific use of the extended running time of the CD format. The cover painting was by {feuilleton} favourite, artist Tom Phillips, with design by artist and designer Russell Mills. Ten years earlier, Eno had used a detail of Phillips’ painting After Raphael on the cover of Another Green World.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you can now see the original sound and vision version of Thursday Afternoon at Ubuweb. Not ideal by any means but it gives you an idea of the complete work rather than the trunctated versions on YouTube. Eno’s video paintings, Thursday Afternoon included, are now available on DVD should you require them in higher quality. Just be prepared to turn your TV on its side.

Update: Eno’s ambient processes have now reached the iPhone with the Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers app, Bloom.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• Generative culture
• Exposure by Robert Fripp
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

I love my Buddha Machine, the music release by Fm3 which comes as a set of sampled loops in a plastic case looking like a cheap pocket radio. This is one music work which can’t be downloaded since the physicality of the thing is as much a part of its attraction and purpose as the loops themselves. It’s probably the most playfully inventive “album” since Chöre & Soli (1983) by Die Tödliche Doris, 8 miniphone records packaged in a box with a battery-driven player like those found in old talking dolls.

I only own one Buddha Machine so I haven’t had the opportunity to try creating a choir of the things with each playing a different loop. Robert Henke’s marvellous Layering Buddha album does this with considerable sophistication, processing the sounds through his bespoke digital filters. For those without their own Buddha Machine or Henke’s technology there’s now the Buddha Machine Wall which allows you to not only play with one machine but to also play several simultaneously. This is actually a lot more fascinating than I expected, it’s essentially an ambient music machine for the web, following the Brian Eno model of creating ambient patterns by layering loops. It’s great; give it a try.

• Layering Buddha Live | Two free downloads from Robert Henke

Previously on { feuilleton }
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

The Fencing Team by Bruce Sargeant.

Artists in the 20th century used to be multifarious in their activities, often taking their work through different stages or periods of evolution; Picasso and Max Ernst are two good examples of this. In today’s inflated art market this is no longer a wise move. As Brian Eno has noted in the case of the polymathic Tom Phillips, the pressure is there to establish yourself as a person who does one thing only, to turn yourself into a brand.

American artist Mark Beard isn’t happy with that situation. In order to satisfy a desire to create in whatever styles he chooses, he’s developed a number of distinct artist personalities, each with their own detailed biographies and even photographs (below). This isn’t entirely unprecedented, Marcel Duchamp famously had a female alter-ego named Rrose Sélavy, and was photographed by Man Ray in feminine attire, but offhand I can’t think of another artist going as far as creating six distinct personas. The painting above is one of a homoerotic sports-themed series by artist Bruce Sargeant who died, we’re told, in 1938 as a result of a wrestling accident. Examples of Beard’s other influences follow. For the complete artist biographies, see the Mark Beard pages at the John Stevenson gallery.

The artists

top left: Mark Beard (b. 1956); right: Bruce Sargeant and model (1898-1938)
middle left: Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1849-1930); right: Brechtolt Steeruwitz (1890-1973)
bottom left: Edith Thayer Cromwell (1993-1962); right: Peter Coulter (b. 1948)

Their works

Ideology: The Politically Correct Disdain the Frivolous by Mark Beard (1989).

Avant la Fuite by Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1894).

Swimmer Drying Himself, Berlin Olympics (1936), Young Athlete by Bruce Sargeant.

On the Strand by Edith Thayer Cromwell.

Das Krakenhaus by Brechtolt Steeruwitz (At the Hospital) (1923).

Cabinet by Peter Coulter.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Moebius, Roedelius.

Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for the past week or two.

Mark Pilkington has very conveniently saved me the trouble of summing up the wandering history of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius in their various incarnations with his introductory piece, Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster & Harmonia. Unlike many of their Krautrock contemporaries, Moebius and Roedelius have remained very active, Roedelius particularly has an extensive solo discography. I’ve never been very taken with their work since the early Eighties, however. I have an inordinate fondness for the analogue keyboards which contribute to their early sound; as the Eighties progressed they took to using digital keyboards and their music lost much of its previous charm as a result.

The Cluster discography is very long and confused, encompassing Kluster (pre-Cluster line-up with Conrad Schnitzler), Cluster, Harmonia (Cluster with Michael Rother from Neu!), Cluster with Brian Eno, then Moebius and Roedelius’s numerous solo works and collaborations with other artists. As a result, a guide such as this is useful for the curious. So here we go with another blog list…

Cluster—Cluster 71 (1971)
A timeless racket. Three long noisy slabs of synth distortion that make the first two noisy Kraftwerk albums seem positively melodic. This could easily be passed off as an unreleased Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire album.

Cluster—Cluster II (1972)
The second album continues the granular challenge but lets some light and music into the mix.

Harmonia—Deluxe (1975)
I prefer the second Harmonia album to the first, and prefer both to Cluster’s third opus, Zuckerzeit, recorded around the same time as this. Michael Rother’s involvement in Harmonia pushes the sound very close to Neu! in places, especially the more melodic strains of Neu! 75.

Harmonia—Harmonia 76: Tracks & Traces (1976)
Albums of studio outtakes are usually for die-hard fans only but this one is surprisingly good with an outstanding long atmospheric piece, Sometimes In Autumn. Brian Eno was hanging out with Cluster by this point and he contributes a vocal on Luneberg Heath.

Cluster—Sowiesoso (1976)
The most melodic and relaxed of all the Cluster albums and the one which birthed a host of inferior copyists on the Sky label.

Cluster & Eno (1977)
Recorded at around the same time as By This River on Eno’s Before And After Science. Holger Czukay from Can is a guest on the Eno albums.

Eno, Moebius & Roedelius—After The Heat (1978)
Of the two Cluster & Eno albums this is probably the best and ends with three Eno songs which turned out to be his last vocal works until Nerve Net in 1992. Note that the CD reissue has a different (and in my view, inferior) track ordering to the vinyl original.

Cluster—Grosses Wasser (1979)
Produced by ex-Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann and recorded at his studio which gave the Cluster guys the opportunity to use his superior synth equipment. As a result a couple of the tracks here are very similar to Baumann’s solo work.

Moebius & Plank—Rastakraut Pasta (1980)
This album and its follow-up should be added to the list of works which influenced Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The opening track News, features sampled radio voices (as per later Eno & Byrne) mixed with a plodding rhythm that includes a recurrent synth note that’s the spit of similar sounds used on My Life.

Moebius & Plank—Material (1981)
Genius producer Conny Plank brought out the best in many of the artists he worked with and these two collaborations with Moebius are a great example of that. He had a similar effect with Roedelius on an early solo album, Durch die Wüste, moving Roedelius out of his ambient keyboards comfort zone. The tone on Material is more strident and uptempo than Rastakraut Pasta, especially on Tollkühn which is like some mad techno synth run ten years too early.

Cluster and co. on YouTube
• Cluster 71
• Harmonia—Deluxe (Immer Wieder)
• Cluster—Sowiesoso
• Cluster & Eno—Für Luise
• Brian Eno—By This River

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf.

“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno

Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in March but news of this has taken a while to emerge. Everything he did in the Seventies is essential, the Neu! albums especially. YouTube has a few choice examples such as this clip of someone playing Neu!’s finest (and oft-imitated) moment, Hallogallo, slightly too fast. Then there’s Isi from Neu! 75 and the crazy glam-punk of Hero (a tremendous period performance) shortly before guitarist Michael Rother left and the band transmuted into La Düsseldorf. For a blast of the latter, there’s the majestic Rheinita from Viva. Happily, Michael Rother is still with us and was interviewed in the most recent issue of The Wire.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The genius of Kraftwerk

I’ve mentioned before that Robert Henke, aka Monolake, is one of my favourite electronic musicians, and it was great last year when he reinstated his habit of offering a free download each month. Unlike the short fragments or scraps that many artists throw to their fans there’s been some substantial work on offer, such as an hour-long live performance of his Layering Buddha set.

The download for this month is a perfect soundtrack to accompany the New Year chill, Fragment Endloss, a 30-minute piece of ambient drift from 1992, reworked slightly for 2008.

This is a very personal piece for me, created in a time where I felt quite dark and lived in an appropriate environment. I just had moved from West-Berlin, Neukoelln, to the east, to Prenzlauer Berg, which at that time was not the expensive hippster neighborhood it is now, but the very opposite. I lived in a small place on the ground floor in a backyard, with a coal oven and a toilet outside the building… It was the end of winter, cold, unfriendly, and very dark. Pretty much like on the pictures above.

Musically this is influenced by ‘The Pearl’ (Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Sound design wise it shows that I just go the TG-77 and SY-77, and then there is this one long brass-like sound that I made as a result of listening to John Chowning.

For the free track of the month version I slightly edited the original 45 minute version and added field recordings of Bahnhof Zoo and the S-Bahn here in Berlin which I also captured in 1992.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• New Monolake

Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. “Storm-stereo” techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969.

An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. It’s a work of musical genius and I’m going to tell you why.

Hanging around with metalheads and bikers in the late Seventies meant mostly sitting in smoke-filled bedrooms listening to music while getting stoned. Among the Zeppelin and Sabbath albums in friends’ vinyl collections you’d often find a small selection of records intended to be played when drug-saturation had reached critical mass. These were usually something by Pink Floyd or Virgin-era Tangerine Dream but there were occasionally diamonds hiding in the rough. I first heard The Faust Tapes under these circumstances, introduced facetiously as “the weirdest record ever made” and still a good contender for that description thirty-four years after it was created. One evening someone put on the White Noise album.

It should be noted that I was no stranger to electronic music at this time, I’d been a Kraftwerk fan since I heard the first strains of Autobahn in 1974 and regarded the work of Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno and Isao Tomita as perfectly natural and encouraging musical developments. But An Electric Storm was altogether different. It was strange, very strange; it was weird and creepy and sexy and funny and utterly frightening; in places it could be many of these things all at once. Electronic music in the Seventies was for the most part made by long-hairs with banks of equipment, photographed on their album sleeves preening among stacks of keyboards, Moog modules and Roland systems. You pretty much knew what they were doing and, if you listened to enough records, you eventually began to spot which instruments they were using. There were no pictures on the White Noise sleeve apart from the aggressive lightning flashes on the front. There was no information about the creators beyond their names and that curious line about “the emotional intensity is at a maximum”. And the sounds these people were making was like nothing on earth.

I recall sitting up and struggling through THC-delirium thinking (aptly) “what the fuck?!” when the orgy sounds first appeared in My Game Of Loving, a multi-tracked multiplicity of orgasmic groans which make Jane Birkin’s expirations on Je t’aime… moi non plus seem like the limpest Gallic ennui. (I must have missed the middle eight of Love Without Sound which quite possibly depicts an unwelcome erotic encounter between a woman and some ratcheted robotic contraption.) These were weird songs; the melodies were weird, the ideas were weird and the sounds were very weird.

After the Jean-Jacques Perrey-inspired hilarity of Here Come The Fleas and some druggy (and weird) psychedelia, we were into side two and The Visitation, a lengthy song/audio drama concerning a dead biker who returns to see his weeping girlfriend for the last time. The middle section is an electronic road journey that predates Kraftwerk’s similar sequence in Autobahn by five years. The simple musical theme was sublimely creepy, the sound effects literally out of this world. To my drug-addled brain this mysterious group had actually managed to create in sound the experience of being dead. This was exhilarating and deeply unnerving. Artist Mati Klarwein once related how it felt hearing Bitches Brew for the first time after Miles Davis had made him snort a line of coke beforehand: “When I heard the tapes I couldn’t believe the music. At first I thought it was the cocaine. Then I realised it was just incredible.” I know how he felt; the emotional intensity was at a maximum.

The final track was the icing on the cake. Of all the musical attempts to depict some kind of Satanic netherworld this is easily the most chilling and convincing. I don’t care what gaggle of blood-drinking, face-painted diabolists you want to bring to the virgin sacrifice, Ozzy and co. included; all must prostrate themselves before a polite bunch of English technicians. Electric Storm In Hell sounds exactly like its title and achieves its ferocity without guitars although the group did rely on a thundering phased drum kit to hold together those sounds of screaming souls being struck by lightning in a godless void.

After this first exposure I quickly acquired a copy of the album myself and played it to death, eventually gaining a reputation for foisting the horrors of side two on people when they were tripping. (To be honest I only did that once…)

Electronic music the hard way: the Unit Delta Plus studio, 1966.

So why was it so good, why does it still sound like nothing else in the history of music? Two words: Radiophonic Workshop. White Noise was a chance grouping of music and electronics student David Vorhaus together with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop who’d been indulging in some extra-curricula activity under the name Unit Delta Plus, a short-lived experimental music project. The Radiophonic Workshop was a special department of musicians and engineers who provided jingles, theme tunes and sound effects for BBC radio and television. Delia’s most famous production was (and still is) her arrangement of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme which she created using tape collage and very primitive oscillator equipment. Despite being reworked many times that original version still sounds unearthly. Not only was this the world’s first electronic TV theme but in 1963 it would have been the first electronic music most people heard at all.

The Radiophonic composers were tasked with creating music and sound effects the hard way, pre-syntheziser, using tape edits, varispeed and whatever rudimentary electronic devices they could lay their hands on. This was all they did, each day and every day, with the BBC footing the bill. So when a producer called asking for something unusual they had a formidable range of techniques that could be applied. Brian Hodgson’s TARDIS sound effects for Doctor Who are still in use today, and all that time spent producing theme tunes meant that Derbyshire and Hodgson were used to applying tape effects and audio collage in the context of popular music, rather than the more usual contemporary classical setting of electro-acoustic composition. David Vorhaus gave the pair the impetus to re-brand themselves and try something new, which is how An Electric Storm came about, with a proposal to Island Records for a vaguely psychedelic single, Love Without Sound. Chris Blackwell was enthused by the idea, gave them some money and told them to come back with an album.

Producing a novelty single was often as far as most electronic musicians got at this time especially given the huge amount of effort required to produce enough music to fill forty minutes. What’s extraordinary about the Electric Storm album is that all of it works, all the songs are great, strange songs. The only thing comparable is the equally wonderful album by Joseph Byrd’s United States of America released the year before which featured similarly great songs with outré arrangements, mostly the product of ring modulators and other crude equipment. Yet that album sounds dated now, albeit in a good way. Many of the songs, despite their lyrical perversity, aren’t so far removed from Jefferson Airplane and the album as a whole owes much to the structural ambition of Sgt Pepper. A few of the White Noise songs sound of their time—Love Without Sound, Firebird (which would have been the single B-side) and Your Hidden Dreams especially so—but the otherworldliness of the arrangements lift them completely out of their era. So many of the tape sounds are completely unprecedented that it didn’t matter that synthesizers were coming along to replace all that laborious cutting and pasting and re-recording. Minimoogs were surprising and new in the early Seventies but now sound like…..Minimoogs; they’re as dated as wah-wah pedals. An Electric Storm still sounds like nothing else ever made. I place much of the originality and the sonic darkness at Delia’s door, she had a genius for the sinister that was evident as far back as the sucking reverse envelope that runs through the Doctor Who theme and the fluttering, purring noise that comes in at its very end. This unique quality has become more evident with the posthumous reissues of her library music and other TV and radio themes and it’s sad that she didn’t live to see the real influence and appreciation of her work that’s blossomed in recent years. In a field usually dominated by male nerds she was brilliant and dedicated and fiercely original.

Delia Derbyshire.

David Vorhaus continued with White Noise after An Electric Storm but his second album lacks the magic and quality of the first; it lacks, I’d suggest, the Delian Mode, to borrow a title from one of Derbyshire’s solo compositions. More crucially it also lacks the song elements that make An Electric Storm such a success. Those original recordings had a curious afterlife, however, turning up in remixed form when Derbyshire and Hodgson worked on another children’s TV series, The Tomorrow People, with Dudley Simpson, and parts of Electric Storm in Hell are played during the invocation scene in Dracula AD 1972, the music there being far more chilling than anything in the rest of the film. Derbyshire and Hodgson also provided a suitable spooky and minimal score to The Legend of Hell House in 1973, a clone of The Haunting which makes me wish that Delia had produced the score for Robert Wise’s original film in place of Humphrey Searle’s orchestral bombast.

Two decades later groups such as Pram and The Orb were sampling from An Electric Storm (listen to Outland on The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld for a repetitive trill swiped from Love Without Sound) while Peter Kember of Spacemen 3 did much to bring Delia back to the attention of the music world before her untimely death in 2001. The work of the Radiophonic people has had a lasting influence on a new generation of British musicians, cited by Aphex Twin, Add N to (X), Broadcast, Pet Shop Boys (who had a track, Radiophonic, on their Nightlife album), Saint Etienne and many others. Most recent of these inspirations come from the Ghost Box collective who combine the jauntiness of Seventies’ library music and TV themes with a particular strain of English spookiness to brilliant effect.

This new CD reissue will be a welcome replacement for the poorly-produced edition from 1992 with its error-ridden insert notes. For more about the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, including an interview with Brian Hodgson and footage of Delia Derbyshire at work, the great BBC documentary, Alchemists of Sound, is on YouTube.

“Love Without Sound” 2:57 (Derbyshire/Vorhaus)
“My Game Of Loving” 3:38 (Duncan/Vorhaus)
“Here Come The Fleas” 2:31 (McDonald/Vorhaus)
“Firebird” 2:43 (Derbyshire/Vorhaus)
“Your Hidden Dreams” 4:25 (McDonald/Vorhaus)
“The Visitations” 11:45 (McDonald/Vorhaus)
“The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell” 7:04 (White Noise)

Credits:
Effects—David Vorhaus
Electronics—Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire
Percussion—Paul Lytton
Producer (Co-ordinator)—David Vorhaus
Vocals—Annie Bird, John Whitman, Val Shaw

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• New Delia Derbyshire
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• The Photophonic Experiment

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a long-overdue look at one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in rock history. The film will explore his music and career, from his early days as a jobbing bass player on the Sunset Strip, to mega-stardom in Britain’s swinging 60s pop scene as lead singer of The Walker Brothers, to his evolution into one of the most astonishing soundmakers of the last few decades.

He’s 63 years old and has just released his first album in over 10 years, The Drift on 4 AD Records. The film features exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the album as well as interviews with friends, collaborators, and fans including, among others:

David Bowie, Radiohead, Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Brian Eno, Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy), Marc Almond, Alison Goldfrapp, Sting, Dot Allison, Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), Richard Hawley, Rob Ellis, Johnny Marr, Gavin Friday, Lulu, Peter Olliff, Angela Morley, Ute Lemper, Ed Bicknell, Evan Parker, Benjamin Biolay, Hector Zazou, Mo Foster, Phil Sheppard, Pete Walsh, and more.

Directed by Stephen Kijak, who brought you the delightfully deranged documentary CINEMANIA (a profile of 5 of NYC’s most manic film buffs), this is a different form of obsession altogether. Inspiring god-like devotion from fans, Scott Walker’s has a cult that has grown considerably since his 1995 release Tilt, a dark and difficult masterwork. His new album takes that sound further than anyone could have imagined?

Collaborators include acclaimed DP/Director Grant Gee (Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy) and Graham Wood, formerly of legendary design collective Tomato.

Produced by Mia Bays, Liz Rose and Stephen Kijak

Associate Producer: Gale Harold

Executive Producer: David Bowie

On release in the UK from April 27th. Details here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exodus art and Plague Songs
• The Drift by Scott Walker

Great abstract animation from the Trollbäck design company for Moonlight in Glory, a track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno & David Byrne. Via Design Observer.

In a similar vein there’s Bruce Connor’s 1981 film for another track, Mea Culpa. Connor also produced a film for America is Waiting from the same album. Continuing the interpretative theme, Eno & Byrne made the album tracks publicly available in 2006 to potential remixers. Some results of that, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, can be found here and here.

Update: the original Moonlight link was deleted but you can still see the video on their site if you hunt through the sample of works shown on the Trollbäck home page.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Forty-six percent of white evangelical Christians believe it’s at least somewhat likely that Jesus Christ will return in 2007, while 22 percent believe it’s very likely. Thirty-four percent of Protestants say it’s at least somewhat likely, compared with 17 percent of Catholics. Ten percent of those with no religion believe that Christ is at least somewhat likely to return in 2007.

Er, okay…. That paragraph should have the word “American” in it, of course.

If you’d like some prognostication from Americans (and others) with brains, the essential Edge.org has unveiled its annual question to scientists, philosophers and futurologists, the subject this time being “What are you optimistic about? Why?”. Lots of juicy speculation from people whose thoughts and opinions are a deal more informed than the usual gaggle of pundits. “The future may be a bit more like Sweden and a bit less like America,” says Brian Eno. Looking at the statistics above, let’s hope so.

“The modern revolutionary Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, carefully revised, perfected and polished to the last detail with our great leader Chairman Mao’s loving care, now glitters with surpassing splendour.

“Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy is one of the outstanding model theatrical works. It describes an episode in the great Chinese People’s War of Liberation, a battle in which a pursuit detachment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army wiped out a Kuomintang die-hard gang in northeast China. The opera creates the brilliant images of Yan Tzu-jung and other proletarian heroes by the method of combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism, and eulogizes Chairman Mao’s great thought on people’s war. The successful creation of the modern revolutionary Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy is a splendid victory for Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line on literature and art.”

Eno produced his own set of strategic cards with artist Peter Schmidt (who painted the cover of Tiger Mountain) a year later, Oblique Strategies, “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.” Originally an expensive limited edition, these are now available in a variety of freeware applications or online versions; best one if you’re among the 17% of Mac-users visiting this site is probably the Dashboard widget, the latest version of which includes the texts of all three editions. The instant access nature of OS X’s Dashboard is especially suited to small information systems such as this.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exodus art and Plague Songs
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Saturday 30 September 2006 Exodus Day in Margate. Commissioned and produced by Artangel

My name is Pharoah Mann and I’m going to change the world. And I’m going to start now by doing what politicians never do. I’m going to say sorry.
Pharoah Mann, Margate 30 September 2006

Plagues of lice, locusts, frogs and flies, a 25-metre high sacrificial sculpture and a cast of thousands will dramatically transform the south coast town of Margate into a colourful and contemporary setting for an epic film inspired by the Old Testament Book of Exodus, in which the town’s residents will play all of the parts.

The Margate Exodus brings together international artists led by Penny Woolcock, including sculptor Antony Gormley, and songwriters Rufus Wainwright, Brian Eno and Imogen Heap, alongside local musicians, singers, actors, costume-makers and set-builders to create a timeless story of identity, migration and the great movement of peoples across the world in search of a promised land. Written and directed for Artangel by acclaimed filmmaker Penny Woolcock, the story of Exodus is told for the present day as a feature film for theatrical release and Channel 4 broadcast in 2007.

Exodus Day on Saturday 30 September takes place in Margate’s town centre, at the Winter Gardens, along the Seawall, through the streets and in the Dreamland funfair. The day opens with Pharaoh’s impassioned election victory speech and ends with an epilogue of fire and water on the coastal path. High above Dreamland towers Antony Gormley’s ominous Waste Man, a giant combustible thrift store sculpture, standing 25 metres tall. Filled with the collective detritus of consumer society and hand built by the local community using abseilers and pulley systems, Waste Mansignals a decisive turning point in the Exodus story and an enduring beacon for Exodus Day.

During the day, a cycle of Plague Songs written by international singer-songwriters and inspired by the ten biblical plagues in the Book of Exodus, are performed by local musicians and singers at the Winter Gardens. A diverse range of musical forces from hurdy-gurdy to hip-hop have been uncovered through auditions held by voice coach Mary King of Channel 4’s Operatunity and musical director and multi-instrumentalist David Coulter. Rufus Wainwright has taken a personal approach to the Death of the First-Born whilst Scott Walker brings about Darkness. Cody ChesnuTT communicates a higher authority with Boils and Martyn Jaques of The Tiger Lillies evokes Hailstones. Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt take wing together for Flies, Laurie Anderson mourns the slaughter of cattle for Death of Livestock and Imogen Heap conjures up a swarm of locusts in the ecstatic Glittering Cloud. A CD of the songs performed by the original singer-songwriters will be available for Exodus Day and on general release in October on 4AD.

The large-scale photographic project Towards a Promised Land, by Wendy Ewald also plays a part in the day’s events. These banner photographs of children who have relocated to Margate from places near and far are sited in various locations around the town. The audience follow an audio trail of the photographs by collecting a headset from a central pick-up point in town or downloading the audio trail as a podcast from the Margate Exodus website. A book of texts and images co-published by Artangel and Steidl, will also be available.

It is anticipated that a great many people from Thanet will take an active part in this ambitious project and that Exodus Day will attract a substantial audience from Kent, London and beyond.

Klashnekoff : Blood [Plague of Blood]
King Creosote : Relate The Tale [Plague of Frogs]
Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields) : The Meaning of Lice [Plague of Lice]
Brian Eno & Robert Wyatt : Flies [Plague of Flies]
Laurie Anderson : The Fifth Plague [Death of Livestock]
Cody ChesnuTT : Boils [Plague of Boils]
The Tiger Lillies : Hailstones [Plague of Hail]
Imogen Heap : Glittering Cloud [Plague of Locusts]
Scott Walker : Darkness [Plague of Darkness]
Rufus Wainwright : Katonah [Death of The Firstborn]

www.themargateexodus.org.uk

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Generative culture
• Wyatting
• The Drift by Scott Walker
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Tom Phillips has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists and he’d certainly be my candidate for one of the world’s greatest living artists even though the world at large stubbornly refuses to agree with this opinion. Phillips’ problem (if we have to look for problems) would seem to be an excess of talent in an art world that doesn’t actually like people to be too talented at all (unless they’re dead geniuses like Picasso) and a lack of the vaunting ego that propels others into the spotlight.

Phillips is predominantly a painter but a restlessly experimental one. On my journey through the London galleries in May I visited the National Portrait Gallery, a rather dull place mostly filled with pictures of the rich and famous by the rich and famous. There were two Tom Phillips works on display in different rooms, inadvertently showing his artistic range: one, a fairly standard (if very finely detailed) portrait of Iris Murdoch, the other a computer screen showing a portrait of Susan Adele Greenfield which manifested as an endlessly-changing series of 169 processed drawings and video stills. One work was static and traditional, the other fluid, contemporary and completely unlike anything else in the building.

But Phillips isn’t only a painter, of course, he produces sculptural works, books such as The Postcard Century (presenting samples of his voluminous postcard collection) and many others, is the author of an experimental opera, IRMA, and co-author (with writer WH Mallock) of the extraordinary A Humument where “the artist plays Pygmalion with WH Mallock’s A Human Document (1892)” by drawing and painting over every single page of a Victorian novel leaving certain words visible, thereby creating a completely new text. A detail of one of his paintings, After Raphael, was used by ex-art pupil Brian Eno as the cover for Another Green World. He also provided the cover art for Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. Eno has said:

It’s a sign of the awfulness of the English art world that he isn’t better known. Tom has committed the worst of all crimes in England. He’s risen above his station. You can sell chemical weapons to doubtful regimes and still get a knighthood, but don’t be too clever, don’t go rising above your station.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another. It’s the same in pop—once you’ve got your brand identity, carry on doing that for the rest of your days and you’ll make a lot of money. Because Tom’s lifetime project ranges over books, music and painting, it looks diffuse, but he is a most coherent artist. I like his work more and more.

Phillips produced the cover for one of King Crimson’s best albums, Starless and Bible Black, adorning it with a display of his habitual stencil lettering and an enigmatic phrase from A Humument, “This night wounds time.” His obsession with Dante has led him to translate The Inferno in order to produce an illustrated edition and in the late Eighties he collaborated with Peter Greenaway on A TV Dante, a marvellous adaptation for television screened in the UK by Channel 4.

Of all his works, one of my favourites remains his ongoing 20 Sites n Years.

Every year on or around the same day (24th May–2nd June) at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map (above) which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place (Site 1: 102 Grove Park SE15) where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser’s death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist.

The intention is that photographs (35 mm transparencies) be taken at twenty locations each year between May 24 and June 2. The locations are situated on what is (in 1973) the nearest walkable route to a perfect circle a half a mile in radius from the point in the home of Artist 1 (102 Grove Park, London SE5) where the project was devised and where these instructions were written. The circuit is divided into sixteen equal sections in each of which there is a site selected by Artist 1. Four other locations mark the route from the centre to the circumference: these are the former studio of Artist 1, his current home and studio, and the art school where he studied. The project book notes the times of the original photographs of 1973 and these should be adhered to as closely as possible (though all photos need not necessarily be taken on the same day) Artist 1 intends that the pictures should be taken by his family and their descendants, if they are willing, and that the work should thus go on indefinitely: the services of their friends may be enrolled or even from time to time that of professional photographers. Continuity is the most important factor.

The result is an evolving pictorial history of a very mundane area of south London; as the pictures accumulate the city begins to flex and change before our eyes like a living being. By turning his attention to ordinary streets rather than grand buildings Phillips has shown us the degree to which our living space is in a continual state of flux as well as revealing curious psychogeographic resonances, like the tank that goes down a road in 1982 when the Falklands War was in progress.

As so often in 20 Sites no pattern or plan is discernible in the changes made to things or their positioning or even their existence. A bench will move here and there, and will disappear altogether to come back again after a while: if indeed 20 Sites is seen as a microcosm of the nation as a whole then an awful lot of people, especially those working for the municipality, are involved in totally random and arbitrary activity. They seem to cancel out each other’s work in a long dance of job protection. It is difficult otherwise (apart from the signals-to-aliens theory) to account for the preparation of a flower bed in 1973 whose display reaches its peak in 1975, goes to seed in 1976, is erased in 1977 to remain more and more vestigially visible until in 1987, when, as if to mark the tenth anniversary of its abandonment, a Christmas tree is planted (by chance or artistry) dead centre of its virtually invisible circle. It made little progress in 1989 and still looks sketchy in 1992.

Every time I look at these pictures I wish I had the discipline to attempt something similar since one could easily clone the project for other cities. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone attempts this elsewhere (assuming they haven’t already) although whether they can sustain the activity the way Phillips has done remains to be seen. His specification that the work should be continued after his death is already assured since his son has been an active participant for some years. I’m curious as to how they’ll proceed in the future now that film cameras are becoming an endangered species (Phillips specifies the type of camera and film stock to be used).

Thames & Hudson publish three books of Phillip’s work, the essential Works and Texts (which includes details of 20 Sites n Years), The Postcard Century and A Humument (now in its fourth edition). If there was any justice in the world, Tate Modern would honour him with a major retrospective. But there isn’t so they won’t.

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, Laforet Museum, Harajuku, Tokyo.

Brian Eno is in the latest Wire talking about his forthcoming DVD-ROM, 77 Million Paintings. He also mentions coining the term “generative music” in 1995 to a resounding silence. 77 Million Paintings continues the generative project:

This will be available later in the year as a DVD-ROM (which will play on most modern computers) and a DVD featuring Brian talking about the project. It also includes an extensive booklet covering Brian’s long and successful career as a visual artist.

The name 77 Million Paintings comes from the possible number of images that can be created from a huge number of combinations. Anyone familiar with Brian’s audio-visual installations will instantly recognise the inspiration behind the project. The music is from Brian’s installation collection.

Ambient stuff for the eyes, in other words. I’d be looking forward to this if I still had a TV (mine packed up a few years ago) as I used to program my primitive Spectrum computer (which still works!) to generate simple patterns, turning the TV screen into an abstract artwork for a few hours. The difference with Eno’s project, of course, is the greater variety, quality and degree of intent involved. I saw one of his installation works, The Quiet Club, at the Hayward Gallery in 2000 which used similar audio and visual processes. With 77 Million Paintings you’ll be able to turn your living room into a quiet club of your own.

In a similar generative vein, there’s WolframTones: “A New Kind of Music – Unique cellphone ringtones created by simple programs from renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram’s computational universe.” Too complicated to explain; go and play around with it.

Wyatting (vb): when jukeboxes go mad

Ned Beauman
Monday July 10, 2006
The Guardian

Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox. Or it was, until the 21st-century caught up with the noisy machine in the corner. There are now nearly 2,000 internet-connected jukeboxes in the UK, each of which can access as many as 2m tracks – and with them has come Wyatting, which is either a fearless act of situationist cultural warfare or a nauseatingly snobbish prank, depending on who you ask.

The phenomenon was first identified in the New York Times by Wendy McClure. She was in a grimy rock bar when someone pulled up Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, which consists of a single distant piano phrase repeated for more than an hour, and found herself too mesmerised to leave. “Imagine replacing the brass cylinder in a music box with a Möbius strip made from nerve endings,” she wrote. The rest of the bar’s patrons , however, were soon in revolt.

This wasn’t to be an isolated incident. After music critic Simon Reynolds linked to McClure’s article on his weblog, several of his readers wrote in to confess that this is a game they regularly play. Carl Neville, a 36-year-old English teacher from London, coined the term “Wyatting” because sticking on Dondestan, the 1991 avant-garde jazz-rock LP by ex-Soft Machine singer Robert Wyatt, is the perfect way to disrupt a busy Friday night in a high street pub. Other favourites are free-jazz clarinetist Evan Parker and surrealist Japanese noise producer Merzbow. In theoretical terms, Wyatting has been explained as enacting the theories of Adorno, who believed that subverting pop music would help to bring down capitalism. Alternatively, if you listen to Neville, it’s simply “childish, futile, but finally hilarious”.

Inevitably a backlash has arrived with other bloggers claiming Wyatting is just a way for those who feel superior, both in terms of class and musical taste, to bait those beneath them. But Inspired Broadcast Networks, which run most of the internet jukeboxes in the UK, insists it has not unleashed a monster.

“Most people won’t spend money on making the pub an irritating environment,” says Anne de Kerckhove, Inspired’s chief operating officer. If landlords do have problems with inappropriate selections, she says, it is usually hip-hop with lots of swearing and in that case, “they can kill a track while it’s playing and reimburse the customer”. Has she thought of limiting the available tracks to those appropriate for drinking and socialising? “The minute we say, ‘You can’t play that,’ then people want to play that. We’re all a bit contrarian in nature.”

Perhaps Wyatting will be added to flicking peanuts and talking loudly about your sex life as Adorno behaviour. But what about the man after whom this controversial sport was named? “I think it’s really funny,” says the 61-year-old Robert Wyatt, whose most recent album, Cuckooland, was nominated for the 2004 Mercury music prize. “I’m very honoured at the idea of becoming a verb.” Would he ever try it himself? “Oh no. I don’t really like disconcerting people. Although often when I try to be normal I disconcert anyway”.